Endorsement: For governor, Michigan needs the nerd, Rick Snyder

Michigan needs a wholesale, cultural change in how state government is done after our long, dark decade of decline.

It’s Republican Rick Snyder’s main selling point in his run for governor on Tuesday.

We’ll bite, with more enthusiasm than some others who back him with a shrug and a “Well, he can’t make it any worse.”

Snyder is up against Democrat Virg Bernero, the tough-talking mayor of Lansing. There’s a lot of appeal in Bernero’s roll-up-your-sleeves, butt-kicking approach, but it seems a lot like what the Great Lakes State has been trying for years, with little to show for it.

We need something completely different.

We need the nerd.

Snyder says Michigan suffers from a broken government and a broken economy. He decided to run for governor a year ago, when he saw the field of candidates emerge from a broken government culture in Lansing.

He grew up in a small house in Battle Creek, and went on to lead the Gateway Inc. computer company. He came back to Michigan, to Ann Arbor, in the late 1990s and got involved in venture capital pursuits helping entrepreneurs get their good ideas off the ground.

His ads and campaign have been light on details, but his main thrust would be to introduce into state government what seems a foreign concept — run it like a business.

Value-for-money budgeting are his bywords. If taxpayers don’t get a big bang, or even a little pop, for their bucks, Snyder’s inclination would be to ask why we’re funding this or that government service.

While government can’t create jobs, Snyder says he would create an environment in which businesses can build jobs. He’d push for elimination of the hated Michigan Business Tax and its surcharge and replace it with a flat, 6 percent corporate income tax.

That proposal raises eyebrows. The state already faces a $1 billion to $1.5 billion deficit in this budget year, and a reworking of the business tax would bring in $1.5 billion less each year.

How to cover a nearly $3 billion gap in spending and revenue? See “value-for-money budgeting.”

As for handling an entrenched culture of partisan politics in Lansing, Snyder somewhat optimistically answers that he’d build relationships, have an open door to all. But he does have a hammer: Snyder has said he might, for example, hold a town hall meeting in the district of a politician who insisted on the familiar Lansing tactic of throwing up roadblocks to needed changes.

The point is that Michigan, and its state and local governments are in crisis. But state leaders haven’t acted as though the bottom is about to fall out of government. Snyder points to the weeks this year the Legislature spent arguing over a proposal to legalize fireworks, while the state budget still was undone.

“That’s unconscionable,” he says.

It is.

But that’s the way Lansing has worked for longer than anyone can remember. And it doesn’t work anymore.

That’s why we Michiganders need the change, the shift in thinking, that Snyder would bring to the top job in state government.

If elected, we urge him to tackle his agenda immediately, before the partisans can align to shut him down for a four-year term. We’ve seen it happen to maverick governors in other states who waited too long to push their changes.

“Don’t walk in my office and ask for funding,” Snyder says. “Talk outcomes that are needed,” and then, perhaps he can be persuaded to help find the money for a particular government service.

Sure sounds like a businessman.

It’s a shift that could turn government away from its plunge into insolvency and toward a future in which Michigan is nationally known for innovation not only in business but also in government.

Snyder’s main goals aren’t all that different from what everyone wants — more jobs and better jobs, to have a state that young people want to stay in and move to, an image better than the broken buckle of the Rust Belt.

The way he would get Michigan there is, however, very different.

It’s a new direction we’re willing to take, because the old ways just don’t work anymore.